Department: Feature

Michael Ryan is a distinguished poet, the author of an explosive memoir, a devoted husband and father…and a writer who, although he seemed to disappear for a while, is now back—and with two new books.

Kent Haruf, the author of Plainsong, writes about people of Colorado's High Plains, a landscape so still and empty that every tree or movement draws notice. And he does it so well that the advent of his newest novel, Eventide, has the usually multi-tasking publishing industry taking a good, long look.

Literary journal editors, those underpaid, overworked masters of small-circulation poetry and fiction magazines, are often the first to publish a writer who goes on to become the Next Big Thing in contemporary American literature. In this survey 14 editors tell their stories from the front lines…and offer advice on how to stand out amid the flux of their overflowing in-boxes.

Travel even briefly through one of poet Robert Kelly's dream geographies and you'll find what his many readers over the past four decades have long known: Kelly offers more modes of imaginative transport than a contingent of thrill-seeking engineers could design. His new collection, Lapis, has just been published.